The worst call I ever got was from a man whose wife had told him nobody explained the decking to her. She had watched the entire inspection. She had asked a question about the valley at minute nine. I remembered it clearly, and my clear memory was worth exactly nothing in that conversation, because it was my word about my own work. What I needed was an inspection attendance record, and at the time I did not have one, so I ate the difference and moved on.
That is a small story with a large lesson in it. A lot of what goes wrong on jobs is not disagreement about the roof. It is disagreement about who knew what, and when they knew it.
What an inspection attendance record actually is
An inspection attendance record is simpler than it sounds. When a link goes out and somebody opens it, that gets written down: which link, which viewer, what time the session was joined, and when they left.
That is the whole thing. Not a surveillance apparatus. A door log.
The reason it works is the same reason the timestamp version works. The record is written on the server side, not asserted by the inspector afterward. I cannot go back and add a viewer who was not there or remove one who was. Neither can anybody in my office. The event log is append-only, so an attendance entry is a fact about what the system observed, not a claim I am making about my own diligence.
What you end up with is a modest but genuinely useful list. Link created at this time. Opened by this viewer at this time. Present for this long. Session ended here.
Why it matters more than the video does
I did not expect this. I built the streaming part first because the streaming part is the obvious part. The attendance part is the one that has saved me actual money.
It answers the "nobody told me" problem. Not by proving somebody understood, which no record can do, but by establishing that they were connected while it was being said. Those are different claims and I try hard to keep them separate.
It shows me who is actually engaged. If I send a link to a homeowner, her brother, and a property manager, and only the brother ever opens it, that tells me who to call. It also tells me the decision is not going to happen this week. I sort out who should be getting links in the first place before the session, not after.
It catches the silent failure. A homeowner who taps a link, gets nothing, and does not call you is invisible without this. She just does not respond, and you assume she is thinking it over. An attendance record showing a join and a fourteen-second session tells you something broke, and you can call her back the same afternoon instead of losing the job to a mystery.
It gives a shared reference point. When four people are on a job and two of them were on the walk, everybody knows who is working from firsthand information and who is working from a summary somebody else gave them.
The conclusions an attendance record will not support
Here is where contractors get themselves in trouble, and I include myself.
A join record shows a connection was open. It does not show a person was watching. Phones get set on counters. Links get opened by a spouse on somebody else's behalf. A twenty-two minute session might mean rapt attention or a phone face-down on a car seat.
It does not show comprehension. Somebody can watch every second of a walkthrough and not absorb what soft decking means. If you want a record of understanding, you have to build that in the conversation: ask the person to say back what they heard, and let that answer live in the recording. An attendance record cannot do it for you.
It does not show identity in any strong sense. It shows that the link you sent to a particular person was opened. Who was actually holding the phone is an inference, and it is a reasonable one, but it is an inference and you should say so out loud rather than let it harden into a claim.
And it says nothing about causation, timing of damage, or fault. I keep coming back to that because it is the failure mode that costs people credibility, and it is worth reading the companion post on the honest limits of what a record shows before you lean on any of this.
I also cannot tell you how any of this plays in a legal setting. I do not know what a court would want, what your state requires, or what an attorney would do with a viewer log. Nothing here is legal advice. If a job is heading somewhere with lawyers in it, ask one before you rely on any of this, and ask early rather than after you have sent files around.
Using it without being weird about it
The way you talk about an inspection attendance record matters as much as having one.
Tell people up front, plainly. When I text a link I say the session is recorded and that the system notes when the link is opened. Nobody has ever objected. What people object to is finding out later.
Do not use it as a gotcha. "The system says you watched for eighteen minutes" is a sentence that will end a relationship. "I want to make sure the part about the north slope came through clearly, because that is the piece that drives the schedule" gets you the same information and keeps you employed.
Send links to the smallest correct group. Every extra recipient is another person who can reach footage of a stranger's back yard. Recordings should sit in private storage behind links that expire on their own rather than living at a permanent address forever.
And keep the narration doing the heavy lifting. Attendance tells you somebody was connected. What they were connected to is on you, which is why the same route and the same spoken structure every time matters so much. That routine is the subject of roof inspection documentation done in a repeatable order, and it is what makes an attendance entry mean anything at all.
Where this fits
Attendance is one of four parts. Time, events, presence, and custody together are what make a file something a stranger can rely on rather than something you are asking to be believed about. The overview of what a field inspection audit trail is puts them in order.
If you want to see exactly what gets logged when a link is opened, and how long recordings stay reachable, the recordkeeping page spells it out.
InspectStream records what an inspector observed. It is not a public adjusting service and does not prepare, negotiate, or advise on insurance claims.